There’s a fine art to working the top keywords into your marketing. You don’t want to get too far away from what you really and truly offer, yet you’ve got to bring in a lot of traffic to make money.

In the old days of the web, there were meta-tags. Unscrupulous web designers would stuff the top keywords into these things so that their sites would pop up at the very top of searches. Thus, you saw some bizarre sights like a website that sold computer keyboards with a meta-tag that said something like:

Needless to say, these web designers found out quickly that being dishonest was not the way to go. So while it’s good if you can work some of the more popular keywords into your site, don’t force it or you will irritate people who came expecting one thing and find another.

When you go to use Google Adwords or Overture, you’ll find out that different keywords cost different amounts of money. Keyword marketing involves purchasing ad units, typically banners and text links, on the search results page of particular keywords. The higher that keyword ranks, the more you will pay.

So you have to decide for yourself what your budget will be. You CAN pay for some of the top keywords and—by writing clever ads that make heavy use of keywords—get top rankings in the actual search results themselves.

The key is to pick your keywords, pay for them, then use the living daylights out of them, but not to the extent that your text is incomprehensible. Most search engines rank sites based on the keywords in the content of each page. If you don’t use the keywords your audience uses to search, they’ll never find you.

Thus, you’ll need to put some planning and thought into your keyword marketing campaign. And like I said, your keyword marketing strategy needs to focus on relevancy. When people use a search engine to find products, services, or information, they begin with a general search.

As they learn more, and come closer to buying, the words they type into the search engine will get more specific to hone in on exactly what they are looking for. Be aware that people are very, very literal-minded on the web.